Q&A: Anna Faith Explains How She Became An Elsa Lookalike

Anna Faith is a pretty normal teenage girl. She just graduated high school, likes going to the beach in the summer, and writes songs in her free time. But she also looks a lot like a certain character from the highest-grossing animated film of all time, which has made her life slightly less than normal. The Internet noticed the similarities between Anna and Elsa about three months ago, when she posted a photo of herself in an Elsa prom dress made for her by her mother. Since then the 18-year-old (who lives in Daytona Beach with her family) has been dressing up as Elsa to entertain children at schools and hospitals, and getting paid to appear at birthday parties. She does her own hair and makeup, wears blue contacts to heighten the similarities, and, of course, has an Arendelle Anna, played by her real-life sister Lexie. Obviously, the kids love it. Our friends at Cosmopolitan.com chatted with Anna (and her mom!) about her nearly 300,000 Instagram followers, her career ambitions, and what it's like to have people think you're a Disney princess. Check it out here.

You just graduated from high school. Do you have any college plans?I was thinking about it, but I don't think it's really going to help me with what I want to do with my career. I want to be an actress, model, and a singer.

Have you always been interested in acting and singing?Forever. I started performing publicly in second grade, and that's around the time when I started modeling. I've been in musical theater and things like that. Right now I'm doing a lot more modeling than singing, but I hope to start singing a lot more now.

So how did you first get into dressing up as Elsa?My mom, my best friend, my sister, and I were walking through the mall, and there was a cardboard cutout of Elsa next to a GameStop. My mom said, "Hey, you should go over there and take a picture by her because people say you look like her." At the time, there were like four people telling me I looked like Elsa. [That day] my hair was up and I wasn't really feeling it, so I was like, "No, I think I'll pass." But my best friend said, "No, go ahead, I'll take the picture." I posted it to my Instagram, and then a lot of people started sharing it. And then it got to TheChive.com, iFunny, and it went viral on Twitter, things like that. It's started dying down a little bit, but now people know that it's me in the picture so they repost it and say, "It's Anna Faith." So since then I've started doing birthday parties and events like that. I'm going to a hospital soon, and we do schools. It's been pretty crazy, but I love every minute of it because of seeing kids smile. It's so cute.

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You have a friend who dresses up as Anna with you, right? It's both my sister and best friend. If one can't make it, the other one goes. It's mainly my sister Lexie.

Were you big Frozen fans before you started dressing up? Or was it just kind of a coincidence that you looked like Elsa and Anna?Lexie wanted to go see with it me right when it came out, so we went with each other and we fell in love with it. It just kind of worked out that way. I absolutely find it amazing how we both look like the characters and are huge fangirls of the movie.

How many times do you think you've seen it? I've seen it three times.

Only three? I was expecting a much higher number. Mom: She's so busy there's not enough time to sit down and watch the movie!Anna: I also go on all these fan pages of the movie, so I read all the behind-the-scenes stuff and I kind of get to know more about it.

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What have people's reactions been?Of course you're going to have good things and bad things. I've gotten a lot more positive feedback, but you're always going to have those people saying, "You don't look like her." But that's fine, because when people are nice, it's like the bad stuff never even exists. Whenever I go to the mall or something dressed up as Elsa, it's so adorable just to see little kids like, "Oh my gosh, Mom! Look, it's Elsa!" And I know this one family, they're good friends with my boyfriend's family, we go over to their house a lot. Their son is just flabbergasted. I don't even know how to describe it. He just opens his mouth and he's like, "Look, it's Elsa!" And his dad asks, "Should I break it to him that you're not really Elsa?" I'm like, "You know what, it's kind of like a Santa Claus thing. He can believe if he wants to."

So what do you do at these events when you appear as Elsa? It depends what kind of event it is. If it's a birthday party, we play Simon Says, we read a book to them. We also sing. We do "Let It Go," "Love Is an Open Door," and "Do You Want to Build a Snowman." The kids know every single word.

Did you make your costume? That dress that you see me wearing was actually my prom dress. My mom made it, actually. The picture [of me wearing it] went viral, and then I went to my prom. I started going out dressed as Elsa after prom.

What did your classmates think of your Elsa prom dress? There's good and bad. It's mostly positive, but there's this little group of girls that don't really like it. But that's OK. Haters are my motivators.

Do you have any secrets to your flawless Elsa braid? It's kind of difficult to figure out. You have start French-braiding it at the top, and then I put it on my left shoulder. I really don't process my hair or anything, but recently I have gotten highlights, just to make it a little bit more of that white color that Elsa has.

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I saw on your Instagram that you're hoping to audition for Once Upon a Time now that they're adding Elsa to the show. How's that going? I'm so surprised at the people that are trying to help me get that part. I just posted it Thursday, asking people for help because I don't know how to get this audition. People started the hashtag #AnnaAsElsa. So hopefully ABC and Once Upon a Time can see that I really want to be Elsa and at least have an audition for the part.

What do you do in your free time when you're not dressing up as Elsa? I like to go to the beach. It's summer now, so that's what everybody's doing here. I like to write songs. Sleeping is always great. I like swimming. Oh, definitely theme parks.

Daytona's not that far from Disney World, right? Yeah, but I've actually only been to Disney a few times. I've been to Universal Studios probably 103 times.

Have you heard from Disney at all from doing this? Anna: No. We've been expecting them, but no.Mom: We did go to Downtown Disney one time, and the girls were mobbed as soon as we walked in. We actually called to get permission from Disney before we did that, and the woman said, "Well, we can't tell you to not to, but if security tells you that you're creating a hazard for people then they may ask you to move on." Well, that's exactly what happened. We walked into Downtown Disney and within three minutes the people were ten deep, parents and kids wanting to take their picture, wanting autographs. It was the most exciting and scary moment of both of my daughters' lives, because they were just mobbed.Anna: People were pulling on our hair, pulling our dresses. "Can you take a picture? Can you sign this?"Mom: Security asked them to move because it was creating a bit of a hazard. Because typically they have people lined up and everything, and they weren't that way, so they had to move. And just even moving through the crowd to try to get out, people were running up to us trying to get us to stop to take a picture, but we couldn't because security said that we couldn't take any more pictures. It was really sad because we had parents that were coming up and begging us to stop and take a picture with their child and it actually just broke our hearts to have to keep walking away or apologizing, and just saying, "We can't, we can't, we have to keep moving." But we snuck a couple pictures in.

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How long do you think you'll be doing this? Hmm. I think a while. Because I really can't see it going away anytime soon. I mean, Cinderella is still a crazy big Disney character. That's how I think always going to be. But of course I'm going to get old and prune-y.

Besides acting as Elsa, what other kind of acting would you be interested in doing or have you done? Actually, I would definitely like to start my singing career very soon. I write songs.

Have you ever recorded anything? It's just kind of a hobby for now. I haven't recorded anything, but I have a few videos on my Instagram. I definitely want to make it my big thing now.

You were saying before your Frozen photo went viral, you already had 180,000 followers on Instagram. How did that happen? Well, I also like to motivate and inspire people to do things that they believe in and always follow their dreams. So it kind of started there. A lot of people promoted my page for modeling and then it got to, "I don't want people to look at me and just be like, 'Oh, she's just famous because she looks like this.'" I want people to know me for who I am and my personality and to know that I like to motivate people. So that's how I got a really big following. And then [the Frozen photo] made me go up something like 100,000 in about four days.

Yeah, I think since I looked at your page Thursday, you'd already gained 10,000. Who do you look at on Instagram for inspiration? I like Danielle Jackson. I just think she's really pretty, and she puts things out online for people to buy and it's really cheap. She gives advice, too.

So Mom, what do you think about all this Frozen stuff? Well, it's a little overwhelming. It's something that Anna has wanted virtually since she was in diapers. She's always wanted to be in the spotlight. You would be recording her little sister and Anna would jump in the front of the camera. She's always wanted to be in the limelight, so this is something she's always dreamed about, and she has an amazing voice. She was Belle in Beauty and the Beast, and she was Eve in Children of Eden. I always felt that this was her calling. But for something like this to happen and be happening so quickly, we're kind of just, "Strap on your seatbelt." We're all just trying to stay calm, just stay focused, and go through what's real and what's not real, and just remember we have to keep the kids excited here and make sure that you make it to the birthday party that you planned on making it to. It's just a lot, but I'm very excited for her because I think she has star quality. God has just blessed her with a little nugget right out of high school. This is great while it lasts, but hopefully it will lead to other things that she wants to do as well, so it's actually pretty amazing.